Tour Gives Dictaphone Workers A Lot More To Brag About

June 23, 1987|By Catherine Hinman of The Sentinel Staff

MELBOURNE — Monday was a big day for Ken Michaud, a senior assembly worker at Dictaphone Corp.'s Melbourne operation.

Standing at his station where recording devices are manufactured and tested, Michaud greeted President Reagan with an extended hand and politely inquired if he had a nice Father's Day. The president said he had.

''This is more exciting than the day when Hurricane David came storming through Melbourne in 1979,'' Michaud said of his first encounter with a U.S. president. ''And that was pretty exciting.''

Few others among the 2,500 people at Dictaphone Monday were lucky enough to shake the president's hand. Only 30 or so employees were scheduled to be in the plant for Reagan's tour.

Outside under a sky that alternately threatened rain or sunburn, the other employees and their guests wait for a view of the president. The Space Coast Philharmonic Orchestra kept time with brassy all-American march tunes. Hot dogs roasted in a long row of charcoal grills.

A dark raincloud had drifted on away by the time Reagan completed a 20- minute plant tour and stepped to a stand to address the throng of company picnickers. And though rain eventually fell on the picnic, it was clearly

Dictaphone Corp.'s day in the sun.

''I think Dictaphone does deserve it,'' said Michaud, an employee of eight years. ''When dignitaries do come to Melbourne, they don't come to Dictaphone, they go to Harris.''

Harris Corp. of Melbourne, a $2 billion-a-year producer of computers and communications equipment, employs 9,000 people in Brevard County. But Harris, running against overseas competition, responded to falling profits in 1986 with a belt tightening that included trimming its payroll by 3,000 people.

Dictaphone, which employs 700 people, does not share the problems of its high-tech neighbor. The recent performance of the maker of voice-processing equipment is plenty for employees to boast about.

In the last four years the Melbourne operation, which was set up in 1978 and has its executive offices in Rye, N.Y., has doubled employment and increased productivity by 70 percent. Dictaphone Corp., a subsidiary of Pitney Bowes of Stamford, Conn., last year reported $234.5 million in sales, up 15 percent from the year before.

The Melbourne plant's results are attributed largely to the management techniques of Cliff Peterson, the vice president of operations who last month wrote Reagan and invited him to tour a plant that had met the competitive challenge of the Japanese.

Peterson's management style has created a corporate culture that supports an environment for open-neck shirts, open communications and positive attitudes, said Roger Manley, head of the management department at the Florida Institute of Technology. And it works.

In 1983, Peterson, 51, was one of the first Melbourne area managers to receive a master's of business administration from FIT's special program for executives. Manley said his innovations at Dictaphone in Melbourne have included putting job seekers into interviews with the people they will work with and giving big bonuses to employees with low absenteeism. For three months with no sick days, they get $50; six months and they get $250; a year and they take home $750.

''He blows their minds up in Dictaphone, New York,'' Manley said.

Peterson is a hero at corporate headquarters now. Dictaphone president Marc Breslawsky had nothing but praise Monday for Peterson.

Asked whether Peterson's coup will mean a bonus, Breslawsky said, ''I can't go into that, but I can tell you he's one of the best managers we've got.''

Breslawsky, wearing a button declaring ''Dictaphone is Competitive,'' said Reagan's tour of the plant was invaluable in public relations and added that he also used to opportunity to suggest that Reagan consider the company's equipment for the White House.

Peterson presented Reagan with a plaque of the company's logo signed by each employee. It was a gift, Peterson said, symbolic of the company's philosophy.

''The primary reason for our success is our people,'' he said. ''. . . We have tried to provide an environment that allows those capabilities to surface and to prosper -- an open, honest, help-people-grow, respect-everyone environment.''

The plant has never had a layoff. ''Cliff said before there would be a layoff, he would leave himself,'' said Leevona Morgan, who works in contract production services building engravers.

Employees were proud for their boss and proud for themselves. Terry Williamson, who operates a machine that automatically inserts integrated circuits into printed circuit boards, said Reagan visited her department because it supplied the heart of the company's equipment and it had made great strides in productivity. She didn't get to shake the president's hand because she had to work the machine, she said.

''But we did get to smile at him, and we did get to see him, and he was close,'' Williamson said.